Registration

Mel and I each moved to Texas separately, and met out here. We were both guilty of this mistake. California requires registration. Texas? Nope.

I’ve been debating registration with a friend for a while now. He’s a good guy, and we get alon on most topics, but he’s one of those schmucks lovely people who insists that the 2A needs revision, and registration should be mandatory.

There’s no arguing with some folks. They won’t accept that registration does not lower crime rates.

Registration only works on large scale; I.E. registering every gun. I belive mr. Grant previously mentioned how the majority of crimes are committed with handguns, not so-called “assault weapons”. And I agree; a long-arm is a terribly impractical weapon for almost any crime. Registration of handguns is a good idea, but government implementation would always fuck it up somehow. They’d have issues getting alcoholics drunk in breweries.

Apache attack helicopter? Probably a .50 BMG Barrett rifle, though you’d have to be a good shot with it. Those are actually production firearms with a significant following in the U.S.
M1A1 Abrams? Those are pretty hard to take down. But THEORETICALLY, you can legally buy a 120mm tank gun and the rounds for it, if you pay your taxes.
No one’s *interested* in the hardware needed to take down a tank. And no matter what California thinks, no one’s firing Barretts at airplanes.
The point that you’re failing to get is, registration of guns does not prevent those guns from being used in a crime.
The VAST majority of firearms used in crimes in the U.S. are possessed illegally. Either 1) stolen and bought from a fence, 2) purchased through a straw purchaser, 3) imported illegally and illegal to own within the U.S., or 4) purchased from a corrupt dealer who forges the documents (probably in that order, though I can’t say for sure).
In cases were the gun *was* legally possessed, the shooter generally knew the victim and went straight to the top of the suspect list.
In either case, how are you going to argue that registration would have prevented the crime?

I really don’t NEED to take out either of those. Neither will be attempting to drag me out of my bed in the middle of the night. My Enfield would be enough to punch into whatever the state chose to try that maneuver. I just wish the German Jewish population had had more foresight and kept some of those, themselves. even one dead agent of the gestapo per neighborhood would have altered the outcome of that “kristallnacht” happeing.

Really? So let’s say we have wide scale registration. How is that going to stop the illegal sale of guns that have been stolen or Guns that have been imported into the country illegally? Mexico has an almost total ban on private ownership of guns yet the cartels are better armed the. The the govt forces. MOST of those guns cross the border from Central America not from the US btw in spite of what some people would have you believe. Full prohibition on drugs has not stopped their import. If the demand for illegal guns suddenly started to support the cost to smuggle them in the same distribution channels could/would be used. Registration, widespread or not, isn’t going to make you safer.

My favorite statistic that gets thrown around is “80% of the guns turned over to the FBI to trace turned out to come from the US.” It’s very important to bear in mind what that actually means: 80% of the guns that the Mexican government believed to come from the US actually did. (Bear in mind that 2000 US guns were intentionally trafficked to Mexico by the ATF.) This is a far, far cry from “80% of guns used in Mexican drug wars came from the US,” which is what people often act like it means. If I were investigating guns for the Mexican government, I wouldn’t even bother contacting the FBI about any selective-fire weapon (which are mostly what’s used down there) because buying one in the US and running it to Mexico would be asinine.

I wonder; do they ever buy semi-auto AKs in the US and mate the parts to full-auto receivers once they’re in Mexico?

Many of the select fire weapons DID come from the US, just not through private sales and gun shops like our media and gov’t would like you to believe…they were sold to the Mexican gov’t by the US for their army and police to use with approval of the US State Dept. Rampant corruption in Mexico led to the select fire M-16s ending up with the cartels.

I’ve met people like that, who could NOT be convinced that raising the minimum wage decreases the overall standard of living, and increases unemployment among the groups that typically have the hardest time getting jobs.

Or you could raise wages while also lowering the working week, giving everyone more free time and actually lowering unemployment. And as a bonus there’d be more employees at any workplace to cover absences. But the current way of doing things gives employers all the power, because it makes employment, any employment, a precious resource.

See, this is what I’m talking about. It is not possible to raise expenses without effect. And make no mistake, your plan has not only the same number of hours, but also higher paperwork and compliance overhead, AND higher compensation expenses. Any suggestions on how the business owner is going to cover all those without raising prices, which is likely to decrease units of sales, and quite possibly overall revenue as well?

Greater income in every employee’s pockets means greater disposable income in every consumer’s pockets, means greater sales for every employer.

Fucking with minimum wage, etc, is not ideal, but what it’s really doing is reversing the trend that caused the problem, which is that employers have collectively skimmed too much off the top, diverting too much money to investment instead of trade, thus slowing the velocity of money throughout the entire economy.

Personally, I’d set a “standard wage” – a living wage – and determine the number of “standard wage workers” based on a regional poverty rate. 20% of people living below the poverty rate means 80% of workers must be paid at least standard wage, and only 20% can be paid below that rate.

Greater income in every employee’s pockets means greater disposable income in every consumer’s pockets, means greater sales for every employer.

In other words, it’s no different from inflating the currency, which is the only thing that has kept minimum wage increases from doing more harm than they otherwise would have. Because costs would go up MORE than wages, prices also go up more than wages, leaving everyone worse off.

A drug gang is not going to keep giving weed to sell to some berk who brings in less than the weed originally cost. Likewise, a business owner like Omar is not going to spend as much on an employee as the value said employee brings to his business. If he consistently does so, he goes out of business, because he is destroying wealth instead of creating it.

Look at it like this: if a minimum wage employee costs $12/hr to keep on the clock (it used to be more like $10, but then we got Obamacare; if you don’t believe my estimate, ask a franchise restaurant or gas station owner), but he can’t actually make more than $12.50/hr, then he had no business having that job in the first place. The point of any business arrangement is for BOTH sides to be better off. If one person is better off and the other person is worse off, then the arrangment should never have been entered into.

What kind of person has a hard time producing $12.50 or more an hour? A black kid who reads at or below 8th grade level, because another employee who costs at least $12/hr has to show and tell him how to do stuff, because he can’t read the manual. A single mother who can’t work regular hours, leading to production delays and slowdowns. A physically or developmentally disabled person, for obvious reasons. In short, the groups where unemployment is highest are the same groups that suffer most when the minimum wage is increased.

I remember a time when there were no self-service gas stations nor self-serve drink fountains. You could hire some kid in high school to pump gas or jerk sodas and it wouldn’t starve your business for funds. When the minimum wage rose, those entry-level jobs got automated out of existence or were given to customers to do, and the people at the very bottom, for whom those were the very best entry-level jobs they could get, wound up unemployed and unemployable. Those who relied upon and enjoyed that level of service also suffered for that loss.

Who benefits? I’m glad you asked.

Everyone who is in a comfortable job benefits, because the pool of competition for work and advancement has been shrunk. In particular, members of unions like AFSCME, SEIU, NEA, and the AFL-CIO benefit, because their contracts stipulate wages of $(Minimum wage +y)/hr, not $X/hr. Wealthy contractors, who don’t have to worry about being underbid, also benefit. And they benefit because they are stifling competition, not because they are providing mutually beneficial arrangements.

I think JL deleted my last reply, for which I’d like to thank him, because it was poorly thought out.

dave, what you are neglecting is the business reality that any increase in business expenses comes out of the pockets of just three groups of people:

the owners (shareholders, for incorporated businesses, who get less profits/dividends)

the employees (by reducing their compensation one way or another)

the customers (who pay higher prices).

Shareholders pay fairly often. They are usually last on the list of who gets paid when a business makes money. (Government, bond holders, lenders, and employees all come way ahead of shareholders.) But if they don’t think they are making enough, they replace the board of directors, who then are likely to replace top management. This kind of reorganization is expensive, and usually there is a reduction in workforce, putting some or most of the employees out of work.

Middle and upper management almost never pay. That’s because they are in charge of deciding the dividend, setting prices, and setting compensation for front line employees. They can divert the expenses to nearly everyone but themselves. The front line employees are the employees who pay when expenses go up. Sometimes some are let go and the rest are made to take over their jobs. The lucky ones who get to keep their jobs often find that their workloads increase, while the overall combination of their benefits, wages, and hours decrease.

Customers nearly always pay. It’s not enough to cut every cost you can through continuous improvement and lean management. Your competition is already doing that and you have to match them just to stay in business. When you’re already running as lean as you can and you can’t reduce your workforce without overwhelming the remainder, you just have to raise prices. Those expenses eventually get passed on, from business to business, until the consumer winds up absorbing them.

In short, it’s like a rat race. Everyone winds up running harder and spending more, but nobody actually gets ahead.

Eh, leave it. If I am an idiot, no point in trying to hide it. And there are valid points I didn’t bother to put in the 2d one. I’m used to seeing my comments with a “held in moderation” note for a day or three, and if the post doesn’t come back up a few days after that goes down, I figure it didn’t make it.

I try to keep the same sort of comment moderation policy on my blog. Aside from obvious spam, the only post I’ve ever refused was a completely anonymous “fuck you.” I know you and I have differences in our definitions of trollery. I don’t try to troll, but I’m not going to argue with you over what crosses the line on your site.

At least your friend be
I eves the 2a should be amended. Assuming he means the only legal way, by passing a constitutional amendment. Personally I am not much of a gun guy but I am big on the rule of law. Passing laws that violate either the letter or the spirit of the constitution degrades liberty. Whether that is the patriot act, or a gun ban. If there was a proposed constitutional amendment to limit the 2a in some fashion I might get behind it depending on what it was and how it was writen. But of you can’t get the overwhelming majority needed to pass the amendment then your dont get to tamper with rights.

The right to self defense and to bear arms comes from GOD, the UNIVERSE, whatever. It is Not a right bestowed by the Bill of Rights, the BOR simply enumerates our natural rights. A Constitutional amendment forbidding arms would be worthless and destroys the consent of the governed. Read a little John Locke for the philosophical foundation of our republic.

Lol what. There is no such thing as a natural right. The world isn’t innately fair. If you want something that you BELIEVE is your right then you need to take it, and make others believe that it is your right also. That is the only way that ‘rights’ exist.

Have to say, I agree with Anon on this one. There is no such thing as a “natural right” that is automatically granted to you, not even the right to live. Animals do not have a system of “rights” that they all naturally respect. They are driven by instinct to survive and reproduce, but this is by no means guaranteed. The concept of “rights” is a human invention that came along once we developed the capacity for introspection, which bred empathy, which fuelled the development of standards of morality, justice, and fairness along with all the various laws, codes, rules, etc. about how to live up to those standards. “Rights” are simply a set of standards that are accepted and enforced within a society; nothing more, nothing less.

Are wild animals slaves? Lions, bears, wolves? No. You seem to have both misunderstood AND understood the point at the same time *shakes head* There are no “rights” that you are guaranteed, not even the right to live. If you want something, you have to fight for it, which IMMEDIATELY makes it no longer a “right”. The definition of a “right” is: a moral or legal entitlement to have or do something. So, technically, yes your right to keep and bear arms IS bestowed by the Bill of Rights. Morality and legality are human inventions, not something that just naturally exist in the world.

Can we make an agreement between political idiots, where liberal morons stop campaigning for gun registration and conservative morons stop campaigning for abstinence-only sexual education? Because both sides would be giving up trying to make something completely pointless happen!

Best idea I’ve heard in a long time, but sadly this is a solution which requires COMMON SENSE, which we all know politicians (liberal and conservative alike) have NONE of. You’d have a better chance of getting the Easter bunny to shit rainbow eggs than you would trying to get politicians to use their brain meats (what little they seem to have).

Canada has had registration for a long time, only recently did we do away with the requirement to register “long guns”. One of the better decisions made by Government, the streets did not run red with the blood of innocents as suggested by the Opposition, but rather taxpayers saved a bunch of money on something that never worked the way “they” said it would. After a shooter with a history of violence killed 4 RCMP officers with an unregistered H&K G3 rifle (believing the criminal to be unarmed thanks to the magic registry), it became clear even to front-line officers that the registry couldn’t protect their lives (http://blogs.canoe.ca/outdoorsguy/tag/randy-kuntz/).

Sad that good people had to die to prove how ineffective the registry was. Having a list of people with guns really only gives you a list of law-abiding people with guns willing to comply with a law, people who you probably won’t ever have to worry about. Compliance with the registry was estimated to be about 50% as well, with 2 million licensed owners and 7 million guns registered out of an estimated 14 million that had been brought into the country for commercial resale. That’s a lot of guns not accounted for.

Could you imagine the compliance in America? Single digits at best I think, if the idea ever got off the ground in most places. Learn from our mistakes, don’t let them push registration on you.

It seems that common wisdom around here (OK) is that there is a state registry, although this is false. When I got into gun ownership, I was a little surprised that I didn’t have to register my new pretties. I soon found out that this is a common misconception, even among natives to the state. Personally, I don’t think that there should be requirements for so much as our current procedure on NICS background checks. If someone is walking around in free society who is not safe to possess and use a deadly weapon, they shouldn’t be walking around in free society in the first place. Perhaps what we need is permanent incarceration and/or more widespread use of capital punishment to violent offenders. Isn’t it odd that prior to ’68 anybody could order a brand new gun out of a Sears catalog, delivered to their doorstep, and there was no rampant violent crime? I know I’m probably preaching to the choir in this forum, but still.

There’s more to the term “gun violence” than it just being a leftist buzzword. It means something very different from crime rates, and we can see this by looking at an interview NPR did with Dr. Wintemute a year or two back. He claimed that “this year, for the first time, more people will die from gun violence than from automobile accidents.” Included in that “gun violence” figure? Suicides and accidents. Replace his term with “gun crime” or “gun murders” or anything else and the argument isn’t even remotely close to true. (It wouldn’t be close even if you factored in negligent storage as “gun crime” and also treated suicide as a crime in the few common-law jurisdictions where that interpretation is valid; it’s no longer a crime by statute in any state in the US, I believe.)

(Quotes are paraphrased; I don’t have a link to the Wintemute interview on hand and think it’s better for my blood pressure if I don’t try and find it. IANAL. If you’re thinking about committing suicide and you’re worried about whether it’s legal, I think you need to re-examine your priorities.)

You know, from all the 24/7 coverage the news has been blaring about the woman from Detroit who used a gun to stop a mob from beating a guy to death, it’s amazing that we barely have heard a peep about the crazy teenager going on a knife attack spree in PA. It’s like the news wants to tell us that no matter how deadly the tool, it’s the mindset of the person using it which matters most. /Citizen of opposite world

I’m IN Britain and I hadn’t heard a thing about Deborah Hughes but have been told all about the knife incident (and the Oscar Pistorius trial) until I’m sick of it. “Click here to watch murdered woman’s mother break down in tears!” “Click here to see moment woman discovers her son was critically injured!” “Click here to watch Oscar Pistorius vomit!” Christ’s sake, guys, I’d rather watch the bloody soccer … or those Glyde condom adverts. Those are good.

None of that conflicts with my statement. Your chart shows ’67 total crime numbers as 2989.7 total per 100,000 population, including 6.2 murders, which is hardly rampant by anyone’s definition, which was my original assertion. If you will read the tables you linked as source, you can see a pretty good climb in crime figures starting in ’68 including a murder rate that has only dipped back down to pre-1968 numbers starting in the 1990s. My point was that our current form of onerous gun restrictions is broken, and prior to it we were no worse off. Thanks for illustrating that for all of us with the numbers you linked to.

I’ve made a similar mistake. I live in Tennessee, and my dad bought me a pocket pistol. We thought (wrongly) that we had to do legal firearms transfer. Nope! Because we are family, it is not nessessary.

It wouldn’t have been necessary even if you weren’t family. It’s not necessary if you are buying it from him, or if it is a gift or whatever the else case may be. TN does not regulate private party firearms transactions beyond what the federal laws dictate with regard to straw purchases.

Not according to the NRAhttp://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/state-laws/new-york.aspx
There is a confusing line in there that states “It shall be unlawful to possess any “assault weapon” or “large capacity ammunition feeding device.””, but reading the text of the law, it seems that they left out the word “unregistered”. The law explicitly states that being semiautomatic doesn’t automatically make it an assault weapon.

Well, if you bought your gun through an FFL, it’s already registered. Though they say there’s officially no record-keeping done in the NICS systems, I’m sure there is behind the scenes. Plus I’ve heard about the ATF going into gunshops and photocopying their stored 4473s.

Just to add some detail: under federal law (specifically, USC 18 § 926(a)), it is illegal to use Form 4473 data to record firearms or firearms transactions. The ATF does it anyway using the eTrace system, using both turned-over records (from closed FFLs) and photocopied records (like you mentioned). Note that even without the latter (for which firm evidence is difficult to come by), the former is still illegal, and the ATF has admitted to doing it in publicly-available presentations about eTrace.

Oh, please.
Gubmint knows damned well that gun registration has no effect on crime. That’s not why they want it. It’s for the same reason they require car registration: TO CHARGE US MUNNEEEE.
Wringing their hands publicly about gun crime is just a mob-inciting tactic to get said mob to agree to firearms regi$tration (while they snicker at us behind said hands).
Hell, they’d have us register every damned thing if they could, and probably will, eventually.

What I always like to say to people who think that registering guns will reduce crime.
“Are you planning to use your guns to commit a crime? If not, then what possible effect could registering your guns have on crime? Criminals don’t register theirs, so the net effect can only be zero.”

that stuff you see in the films, about matching bullets/shell casings to the gun it was fired from? yeah, not so simple.

firing a gun is a violent process. no, im not left wing, its science. think about it.

a .38 special round has 16,000 PSI of pressure, lobbing a 158 grain bullet out at somewhere around 800 FPS. alot of room for things to deform in amasingly un-uniform manners.

1: bullet. if it srikes an object, forget about getting rifling off of it. deformation has ruined any comparison you could make. best bet would be if it struck, say, a bathtub full of water where it deforms uniformly.

2: casing: not all casings are alike. different batches of cases, even from the same manufacturer, will have different brass consistency, stretch rate, etc.

3: the gun: barrels/chambers change over time, whether that be thousands of rounds fired, accidental damage from a steel cleaning rod, or intentional alterations (ie, jamming a screwdriver in and scratching it) so its unlikely that a barrels pattern will remain the same over a guns lifetime.

4: the database: up to this point, i am almost certain they do not have a complete database of ejected shell casings/bullets, even on registered firearms. even if they did, they would be completely unable to maintain or run it in an orderly fashion. if you need an example, look at the american department of motor vehicles. its a mess.

In conclusion, the only possible remaining reason for registration of firearms would be to take them away from people who become convicted of a crime. but lets not kid ourselves, thats going to happen anyways. that always includes a search of the premises, which will turn up your firearms, which will be confiscated.

even once a person gets out of prison, there are other “off grid” ways of getting one.

in conclusion, its an entirely useless system for any purpose besides mass collection of firearms, should they decide to ban them outright.

Aren’t those the things Oscar Schindler said he needed Jewish children to polish on the insides?

I thought the matching done on “empty cases” or “ejected cartridges” (it varies geographically) was mostly on the imprint of the firing pin in the primer and possibly also the scratches made by the ejector on the rim.

Silly question: but as a protest, can we register fictional guns? Especially if we live out of NY state? I have a plasma rifle in a 40 megawatt range, a BFG-9000, and a railgun I need to register. But I think NY state made the empathy gun illegal to own; something about its use negating the law.
And Nerf guns? Do we need to register those if they hold more than 7 darts?

Culture, and social conditions – not weapons. Chicago has huge numbers of weapons floating about, under the surface… They just simply have a better system of social support and a culture that respects life more than some other places.